Thursday, July 02, 2009

Minor brush with celebrity

I recently discovered that Zoë from the band Looner is the daughter of famous film score composer Basil Poledouris! I met her a few years ago.

Zoë and her husband Angel emailed me, said they really liked my art and asked if I'd be interested in doing some for an album cover. They had seen this image on Google Image Search:

It's titled "Bah-loon" on my website and I guess it came up when they searched for "looner" or "loon." I then went to one of their shows and met them and we seemed to hit it off. They were both very nice and enthusiastic about working together. We corresponded a bit via email as I worked on thumbnails for them. Then we picked one that we decided on as a final, which I finished and sent over.

I didn't hear anything back for a while, so I emailed them again, and got a really weird and short message back. Something about a friend or associate dying and them moving to another state. No, "hey, thanks for the work," no "sorry, we've decided to go in a different direction," nothing. Just a statement of fact and no further contact. They'd been using one of my images in their promo material for a while, and continued to do so after breaking off contact, but I waited a bit and they eventually removed it all.

It was a bummer because I liked the concept we worked out and we got along well. It was one of the more fun projects to work on, simple though it is. I still have a t-shirt and CD they gave me that night.

Nope, didn't get a cent. In fact, for all the work I've done for various bands over the years, I've never been paid for a single one. Some were special circumstances, but it's frustrating that several of them fell through after a lot of work had been done (band broke up; band decided to go a different direction).